Various types of hand-held electronic reading devices have been proposed to electronically display textual information for reading by a user. A typical hand-held electronic reading device includes a display device to display the textual information and a user interface which allows a user to navigate through the textual information and access various features of the electronic reading device. The display device and the user interface are incorporated in a hand-held housing to facilitate portability of the electronic reading device.
Many hand-held electronic reading devices have a user interface in the form one or more external buttons. The buttons are depressed in a predetermined manner either to navigate through the textual information or to access various features of the device. However, many hand-held electronic reading devices implement the user interface in a manner which does not provide a simple, intuitive, or efficient method for navigating the textual information or for accessing the features.
The lack of simplicity of using current hand-held electronic reading devices along with the lack of comfort in handling many of these devices result in some people preferring to read a real paper book rather than using a hand-held electronic reading device.
The textual information displayed by the hand-held electronic reading device is typically stored in a memory device or the like. U.S. Pat. No. 5,239,665 to Tsuchiya discloses an electronic book having an interface which receives an external memory, such as a floppy disk or a laser card, containing the textual information. The textual information addresses a character generator in the form of a read-only memory within the electronic book. When addressed, the read-only memory supplies a font signal to permit excitation of selected pixels of a display device in the shape of a desired character. The external memory has a storage area allotted to store selected extra characters not contained in the read-only memory.